"Sandford Abbey is about five miles from you--across the park. The two estates meet. Do you know--Sir Philip Meryon?" Rose Flaxman shrugged her shoulders. "We know something of him--at least Hugh does. His mother was a very old friend of Hugh's family." Mr. Barron was silent. "Is he such a scamp?" said Mrs. Flaxman, raising her fine eyes, with a laugh in them. "You make me quite anxious to see him!" Mr. Barron echoed the laugh, stiffly. "I doubt whether your husband will wish to bring him here. He gathers some strange company at the Abbey. He is there now for the fishing." Manvers inquired who this gentleman might be; and Mrs. Flaxman gave him a lightly touched account. A young man of wealth and family, it seemed, but spoilt from his earliest days, and left fatherless at nineteen, with only an adoring but quite ineffectual mother to take account of. Some notorious love affairs at home and abroad; a wild practical joke or two, played on prominent people, and largely advertised in the newspapers; an audacious novel, and a censored play--he had achieved all these things by the age of thirty, and was now almost penniless, and still unmarried. "Hugh says that the Abbey is falling into ruin--and that the young man has about a hundred a year left out of his fortune. On this he keeps apparently an army of servants and a couple of hunters! The strange thing is--Hugh discovered it when he went to call on the Rector the other day--that this preposterous young man is a first cousin of Mr. Meynell's. His mother, Lady Meryon, and the Rector's mother were sisters. The Rector, however, seems to have dropped him long ago." Mr. Barron still sat silent. "Is he really too bad to talk about?" cried Mrs. Flaxman, impatiently. "I think I had rather not discuss him," said her visitor, with decision; and she, protesting that Philip Meryon was now endowed with all the charms, both of villainy and mystery, let the subject drop. Mr. Barron returned, as though with relief, to architecture, talked agreeably of the glories of a famous Tudor house on the west side, and an equally famous Queen Anne house on the east side of the Chase. But the churches of the district, according to him, were on the whole disappointing--inferior to those of other districts within reach. Here, indeed, he showed himself an expert; and a far too minute discourse on the relative merits of the church architecture of two or three of the midland counties flowed on and on through Mrs. Flaxman's tea-making, while the deaf daughter became entirely speechless; and Manvers--disillusioned--gradually assumed an aspect of profound melancholy, which merely meant that his wits were wool gathering. "Well, I thought Upcote Minor church a very pretty church," said Rose Flaxman at last, with a touch of revolt. "The old screen is beautiful--and who on earth has done all that carving of the pulpit--and the reredos?"